CUTTING IN: EXTRACTS

"There it is, the huge, dying cargo, then dead, ready for 'cutting in.'"
—from Herman Melville by Elizabeth Hardwick

"I felt I had stumbled across a kind of treasure map to the barnacle-encrusted wreck of something true and important sunk deep inside of me, and I decided to try to bring it up and expose it to the light."
—from "Diving into the Wreck," as found in Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

"Moby Dick A novel by Herman Melville. Its central character, Captain Ahab, engages in a mad, obsessive quest for Moby Dick, a great white whale. The novel opens with the famous sentence 'Call me Ishmael.'"
—entry in "Literature in English" from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 2nd Edition, Revised and Updated by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil

"Melville, Herman An American author of the nineteenth century, best known for Moby Dick. In his writing, Melville drew on several adventurous years he spent at sea.
—entry in "Literature in English" from The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 2nd Edition, Revised and Updated by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil

"This is the mood of Moby-Dick and the whaler Pequod, a death ship but not a vessel of mundane commercial ferocity. The aim is, under Captain Ahab, only incidentally, if that, bound to fill vats with oil and return to Nantucket with household and family income. It's a voyage of arcane personal vindication, the death of the White Whale in payment or vengeance for the leg he has taken from Ahab."
—from Herman Melville by Elizabeth Hardwick

"An implication holds firm, a connection between wild Leviathan and wilder Deity. The realism is astonishing, on the face of it. No hook, we are told, avails to lead the one or the Other about, no bit in the tongue, no ring in the nostril, no gaff through the cheek."
—from Job: And Death No Dominion by Daniel Berrigan

"Shall you perhaps lead Leviathan about on a leash? Or will he consent to play slave to your beck and call? Or perhaps you would carve the great armored creature in pieces, selling chunks of crocodile in a market, like pounds of fish? Careful, you sport with death."
—from Job: And Death No Dominion by Daniel Berrigan

"However, Massachusetts always bounced back in peacetime, and by 1820 New Bedford, the greatest port of all, took over, captaining the pursuit of the fierce but especially oil-rich sperm whales later immortalized by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick. Absorbing the fleets of other nearby whaling centers, New Bedford in 1845 sent ten thousand seamen in more than three hundred ships to bring home its greatest receipts: 158,000 barrels of sperm oil, 272,000 barrles of other whale oil, and 300,000 pounds of whalebone (much in demand for corsets and suchlike)."
—from American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century by Kevin Phillips

"[Emily Dickinson's] agonizing sense of ironic contrasts; of the weight of suffering; of the human predicament in which man is mocked, destroyed, and beckoned to some incomprehensible repose; of the limits of reason, order, and justice in human as well as divine relationships: —this is the anguish of the Shakespeare of King Lear, and it was shared in like degree among nineteenth-century American writers only by Herman Melville, who also had his war with God. Yet, unlike Melville, she is willing to love the God with whom she is at war. Thus she is a closer spiritual neighbor to Jonathan Edwards, who believed (as she evidently did) that final judgment is not a foreseeable end, but a pronouncement renewed in all moments of existence."
—from "The Vision and Veto of Emily Dickinson" by Thomas H. Johnson, as found in Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson's Poems by Emily Dickinson

"Others Noll finds approaching his insights were also far from Evangelical thought—Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. What he does not state is that Dickinson and Melville, too, were influenced by the Transcendentalists. * * * 'Post-Christian theists' is what most Transcendentalists would have called themselves. Lincoln, in a time of apocalyptic fanaticisms, was an example of both Enlightened religion—the religion of Melville and Dickinson—and of the Evangelical instincts of his black contemporaries: the religion of Frederick Douglass."
—from Head and Heart: American Christianities by Garry Wills

"Split your lungs with blood and thunder / When you see the White Whale / Break your backs and crack your oars men / If you wish to prevail."
—from "Blood and Thunder" as found on the album Leviathan by Mastodon

"Neither Melville nor his Ahab were concerned with validity of intensity. Intensity is by its very charge valid for he who experiences it."
—Williams S. Burroughs to Allen Ginsberg in a letter dated June 4, 1952, as included in The Letters of William S. Burroughs: 1945-1959

"[Ahab's] speeches and meditations seem to flow from the Bible, Shakespeare, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Gothic novels, Edgar Allan Poe, The Count of Monte Cristo, Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, and Dickens. * * * In the world where trading in sperm oil is a way of life, Ahab's speeches are simply unbelievable. But on their own plane of discourse, despite a good many absurdities, they have a kind of wild rhetorical energy that somehow prepares the reader to accept the appearance of Fedallah, his prophecies, the madness of Pip, the revulsion and obedience of the mates, and other omens or warnings of something fearful to come, quite as "real" as the discussion of ambergris in chapter 92."
—from "A Commentary" by Howard Mumford Jones, as found in the 1976 W.W. Norton edition of Moby-Dick; or, the Whale

"They told you it was a war for the soul of America, but you didn't believe them. They kept saying you were the Enemy, but you wouldn't accept that, because you didn't feel like an enemy. Now you know they meant every word, and more."
—from American Nomad by Steve Erickson

"Moby-Dick (1851) was published to a mixed reception, and sales were disappointing. This masculine, experimental novel did not appeal to a novel-reading public principally comprising women."
—from The Harper American Literature (Volume 1)

"Like Melville, [Robert] Lowell is filled with fury at the spectacle of mankind beating its brains out in a spurious race after the unattainable—call it the White Whale, World Conquest, the Perfect State, or what you will—and like Melville, he comes to endow the symbolism of this chase, inhuman and homicidal, with a greater reality than those who have seemed to lose their humanity in its madness."
—from a November 3, 1946 review of Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell as found in The New York Times, written by Selden Rodman, and eventually collected in Books of the Century: A Hundred Years of Authors, Ideas and Literature

"Into Moby-Dick, which he was writing as he wrote to Hawthorne, [Melville] put 'the sane madness of vital truth,' and the world didn't want to hear it."
—from "Introduction" by Frederick Busch, as found in the 1986 Penguin Classics edition of Billy Budd and Other Stories

"Melville's magnetism held the entire Hawthorne family in its grip long after Hawthorne and Melville ceased to see one another. Said Julian Hawthorne in retrospect, 'There were few honester or more lovable men than Herman Melville.'"
—from Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple

"Missing from this list of 'all the elements [of the originals: the plot, the characters, the social, historical, and local backgrounds and the authors' language and style],' however, are digression, texture, and weirdness, three of the literary values most characteristic of Melville's work."
—from the Special Fiction Issue (Summer 2009, Volume XXIX) of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Herman Melville's ; or The Whale edited by Damion Searls

"But the most lasting experience I have had that keeps me continually aware that writing is a great mystery is the experience of reading Melville."
—from "Melville's Sacramental Style" as found in Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now by Andrew Delbanco